1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to organization charts and more specifically to the visualization of organizational structures.
2. Background Art
Most meetings between people or organizations who are unfamiliar with each other start with an ad hoc presentation of organization charts. These presentations are hand-tailored and generally provide information regarding the organization's hierarchy and the people in the hierarchy. The organization charts are considered to be very valuable information and are often labeled “Company Confidential” to prevent widespread dissemination of the information.
Existing organization chart tools are not connected to work in “active environments”. An active environment is one in which people, places, and things are first-class citizens of a connected wired and wireless world where e-services meet the physical world in which humans are mobile, devices and services are federated and context aware, and everything has a web presence.
Since the existing organization charting tools were not conceived to connect to an active environment, these tools cannot dynamically create the minimal organization chart needed in a meeting in which it is desired to position the people attending the meeting inside a context to optimize a discussion. Essentially, these existing organization charting tools are mainly used internally in companies because of the need to restrict dissemination of confidential and/or proprietary information outside the company.
Further, although there are various types of other visual representations than organization charts, such as spreadsheets, databases, or bar charts, these are generally not used with organization charts in a way to structure information to see various types of relationships, which may be critical to understanding the “big picture”.